Apple Qmaster 2 and Compressor 2 (Distributed Processing Setup) - Manual (Page 6)

6 Preface Introduction to Distributed Processing
Using Distributed Processing to Increase
Speed and Efficiency
Distributed processing accelerates processing by distributing the work to multiple
computers that have been chosen to provide more processing power. You can submit
batches of processing jobs to Apple Qmaster, which allocates those jobs to other
computers in the most efficient way (described in more detail in “
How the
Apple Qmaster System Distributes Batches ” on page 9).
Computers that submit batches to the Apple Qmaster distributed processing system
are called
clients. A job is a processing task such as a Compressor preset-source pair, or
a Shake file, or other file or commands, that use UNIX commands to specify settings
such as rendering instructions and file locations and destinations.
A batch is one or more jobs submitted for processing at one time. The procedure is
analogous to printing multi-page documents from a word processing program; the files
are spooled and processed in the background. Although a batch can include just one
job, you will typically want to submit several jobs at once for processing. Similarly,
several people can use the same Apple Qmaster system at the same time, with several
client computers sending batches in the same time frame. Batches are managed and
distributed by the computer that is designated as the Apple Qmaster
cluster controller,
which is described in the next section.
Batch of
processing jobs
Client computer
Jobs are submitted.
Destination folder
Files are placed at
specified destination.
Processing
files
Apple Qmaster cluster
Processing is
performed by cluster.
UP01082.Book Page 6 Wednesday, March 16, 2005 5:12 PM